


A Drink for the Sinners

by Folle



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Fate & Destiny, Reincarnation, Secret Santa, a little bit of an au sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-01
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-12 06:27:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13541655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Folle/pseuds/Folle
Summary: Lieutenant Gracie never believed in showing quarter to an enemy who attacked civilians.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ScientistSalarian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScientistSalarian/gifts).



> IM SO SORRY THIS IS LAAAAAAATE MY COMPUTER SHIT ITSELF AND COLLEGE DRAMA IS KICKING MY ASS

Gracie wasn’t a science kind of woman, she made this very clear from the beginning. She knew basic anatomy, chemistry, and engineering, but that was part of basic training. Ask her where an enemies weak point is, and she can point out seven within the next few seconds, ask her about her ship, and she can tell you every little miniscule detail about it, tell her to make a bomb, and she’ll scrounge one up from scraps in the kitchen and make it just as effective as any other frag.

But that was the extent of her knowledge. She didn’t know how poison affected the body, or how neurons and cells work, or how generators make power. And she sure as hell didn’t know a single thing about the alien strapped to the gurney in front of her. It was butt ugly, in her opinion, with weird blue smudged on its face. Blood, it was definitely blood. But then again, blood smears wouldn’t look so neat.

He was brought in by a nurse with frazzled hair and covered in sweat. Begging to help her save it. Like it was some dog she had run over and was pleading with her dad to make it better. Gracie wanted to laugh in her face, and blow it’s head off with a pistol. But there was a look in the nurse’s eye and whines coming from the alien that restrained her response.

“Please, Lieutenant, you know more about them than I do. If we save it, maybe we can end this stupid war.” Blue was seeping out from the sheet it was restrained in.

“I know how to kill them but that’s about it. Besides, if it’s bleeding that much, I don’t think it’s going to last very long.” She becomes unusually solemn. She’d mowed down more of these bastards then she can even remember. They all blur together. But there’s pangs of guilt making her feel nauseous at the thought of killing it. Maybe it’s her honor preventing her. He’s hurt and restrained, not a monster trying to kill her.

“There’s nothing then? I tried to help him, but I don’t know…  Their anatomy is weird and I think I made things worse than before. It’s only my first week out of basic and I haven’t even been to college…” Tears well up in her eyes, and the hand she has on the gurney balls into a fist. God, Gracie realizes she only a kid, just barely on the cusp of adulthood.

Something inside of Gracie softens. “Hey, you’re doing just fine for not being a nurse. You gotta know that you can’t save everyone. Do you know what you have to do when you have someone like that?”

The nurse shakes her head, and looks up at Gracie.

“You make them comfortable, okay?” She unstraps the restraints on the gurney, and move the sheet aside. “Wad up some gauze, soak it in morphine, and place it in the bullet would. I’ll try and find a way and stop the bleeding.”

“Yes ma’am!” It seems to get her spirit in shape enough to have her dashing out of the small alcove of an office in the make-shift hospital.

The bullet wound was on its chest, and was releasing a steady stream of blue blood. No amount of pressing down on the area seemed to help. Seems like he took an anti-material round to the chest from quite the distance, and the round itself was lodged in its chest.

There was no way possible Gracie could save it. The stiffness of its carapace made it almost impossible to try to get in at the bullet. Instead, she stuffed gauze soaked in disinfectant in the deep wound, before tightly securing a bandage over it. At least it helped stop the blood from seeping out everywhere. She took a spot next to the alien, and slowly stroked its head.

It tried putting up a protest, but was too weak to do anything besides weakly thrash about, and try and get a swipe in at her face. It wasn’t anything that she wasn’t used to, having to give her cats baths and all when she was younger. “I don’t know if you can even understand us, but we’re going to help you. I promise that. You won’t live, but you’ll be able to pass on peacefully. I don’t know what your traditions are, but I’ll make sure to give you a proper human burial.”

She knows it doesn’t understand, and yet it calms down anyways. Its race is clearly as intelligent as humans, so maybe it understands her tone, like a dog would.  It reached a hand out to her, one she took and held to her chest.

“That’s a human heartbeat. Do you feel it? We’re not so different. We work the same, but why did you have to attack us? So many humans were excited to meet a new intelligent race. We’ve been dreaming about it for centuries. But I think this will just ruin any chance of a future we could build together.” She likes to believe that the alien knows what she’s saying. Or maybe it’s doing the same thing she does when it makes a trilling purr.

“Can you imagine it? If you’re this strong and advanced on your own, imagine how much we could accomplish if we combine forces. Humans may not be as much in comparison, but we’re stubborn and passionate and crazy as all hell.”

In the distance, she can hear the shells and the screaming. Technically, they’re not shells, but it makes her feel more human to call them that. She gently shifts the alien over, and crawls into the gurney next to it.

It’s surprised to say the least, but is not able to find the strength to stop her. Not when she slides in, not when she presses their faces together, not when she wraps her arms around him.

“Do you think they even know you’re alive, or in here? Do they truly hate us humans that much?” Her voice is barely above a whisper, but the mandibles on the alien twitches and it emanates a low whine. She rests one of her hands on his face. “I don’t hate you. I know you guys think otherwise, but I truly don’t. Just bad circumstances.”

The whistling of shells gets closer, and she can hear the far end of the building explode into rubble.

“I like to think that maybe in another time, or another world, we could have been friends. Don’t you?”

It’s the last thing Gracie says, and the last thing the alien hears before a shell comes down, directly above them.


	2. Chapter 2

When she wakes up, she’s in a pristine hospital bed. The lights were a blinding white. Or her face hurt so much so that it seemed like it. It was hot, and swollen, and she couldn’t even move any part of her body. Everything seemed so perfect and clean. Almost to the point that it seemed unnatural.

She was in a room with no windows, but that didn’t matter. There were more than enough lamps in the room to keep everything lit up. Everything seemed just a little bit off, but she didn’t pay much mind to it. The only thing she could even think of was the blue of the alien she held in her arms when…

When…

Oh, yeah. That’s right. The shells, the makeshift hospital base. That alien they found in the battlefield after struggling with ground forces on Shanxi. God, she was lucky a nurse found that alien instead of one of the science geeks. They would have torn it to shreds trying to find any weakness.

It was just her luck that someone happened to walk in as soon as she was going to try and crawl out of bed and get to the wheelchair parked in the corner.

“Privet, menya zovut d-r Savanna. YA rad, chto ty nakonets prosnulsya. Nasha tekhnologiya neispravna, poetomu my ne mozhem poluchit' identifikatsiyu DNK. Mozhete li vy skazat' nam, kto vy?”

She tilts her head to the side. Russian? She was almost certain her translator should have covered the language, but then again, those things were faulty, to the point where she has had to slap many people over misunderstandings and mistranslations.

“Excusez-moi, mais je ne parle pas le russe. Je m'appelle Lieutenant Grace, je suis membre de l'Alliance navale. J'étais avec un extraterrestre quand nous avons été attaqués, il va bien?”

He too gives her a quizzical look, before slapping his forehead. “Chı̀ nạk pæl k̄hxng khuṇ t̂xng rīsĕt pheīyng khæ̀ khrū̀ h̄nụ̀ng pord læa thuk xỳāng ca dī.” His arm is encompassed by orange, and he waves it over her face. After it beeps, the orange disappears.

“There we go, we should be all set to go now. As I was saying, my name is Dr. Savannah. You’ve been asleep for a long time Lieutenant. Partially due to the trauma, partially because you needed extensive surgery and to heal, so we induced a coma.”

“Oh, and now that I’m all fixed up and peachy keen it was time to wake me up?” She doesn’t mean to snipe at him, but she can’t help it. Something inside her stirs up irritation.

He sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Yes, Lieutenant. You will heal faster while not in a coma since your metabolism is no longer stunted. However, that is not the only reason. There was a turian a few months ago that insisted on being made aware of whenever you were awakened.”

Turian? She had heard some big wigs back on Earth give that name to the aliens, but no one with boots on ground in Shanxi could give them enough respect to call them anything but “it”. But maybe it was… If there was any chance that it survived, then she had to know. Making friends with the enemy was vehemently forbidden, but what did she care? It was injured, and found similar comfort in her that she did it.

Dr. Savannah helped her get into the wheelchair with help from a nurse. As she suspected, one of her legs was in a thick gel cast, and the other was missing. Explained why she couldn’t feel her toes. One of her arms, from the mid forearm down was missing, as was a finger or two of the other hand. She had heard people talk about phantom limbs, but this was down right strange.

They wheeled her down the hallways, were she saw many different peoples on cots, blanket pallets, gurneys, makeshift beds from furniture, real beds, and hospital beds. Most of them seemed to be doing well in their treatment, but just as many were shell shocked, and stared off into the distance with bug eyes.

The room she was wheeled into was a barebone, spartan style room. On the floor was a blanket pallet, with a thick quilt pushed to the side, a trunk, and a case for a sniper. There was an alien standing in the middle with its back turned to her. After parking her, the doctor promptly left and closed the door.

As the alien turned around, she leaped out of the chair trying to cling to him. “Garrus!” The name blurted from her lips felt wrong. But at the same time felt more natural than anything before. He held her tightly in his arms, nearly sobbing, if they could even do that. “Shepard. I knew you would pull through. You always do.”

The dreamy sound of his voice lulled her out of her state, and Shepard couldn’t even remember why she had felt such unease staring at a turian. “I couldn’t leave you down here alone, that bar would get awfully empty waiting for you. Where Vakarian goes, Shepard goes.”

Garrus lays the both of them down on his blanket pallet, and pulls the quilt over the both of their heads, extremely careful of Shepard’s state. He stares at her like he feels he’s never going to see her again, and she clings to him the best she can, tracing the clan marks on his face.

They talk about aimless things for so long, it feels like only a few minutes had passed until Savannah came back to bring Shepard back to her room. As he helps her back up into her chair, Shepard gets an odd, cloudy look on her face.

“Garrus, do you ever feel like we’ve known each other forever?” she asks as Garrus insists on wheeling her back down to her room.

“Hmmm, we kind of have, or at least it feels like that to me. As soon as I saw you on the news after Akuze, it was like looking at an old photograph. And when we first met at the citadel, I had to stop myself from hugging you, but I don’t know why.”

“Huh, interesting.”

“Any particular reason you asked me that?”

“Oh, just had a strange dream while I was asleep. About a strange turian that looked like you.”

“Was it about a human who tries to save him, but can’t?”

“You too then?

“Yeah. Joker said I was lucky to meet someone from a previous life, let alone fall in love with them.”

It’s more difficult getting Shepard back into bed, than it was getting her out. But as soon as she’s settled, Garrus carefully slots himself in at her side, careful not to disturb any of her injuries.

“Must be destiny then, me being the luckiest gal in the galaxy to get a turian like you.”


End file.
